00:40:40 · Scott Kupor
[00:40:40] S1: So I had a manager who like told me that they're like, you guys suck because our whole pitch to people is come here and you have lifetime employment. I told her this, I'm like, look, that is the worst pitch I've ever heard. Like there's not a single person under the age of 30 today who is thinking about lifetime employment. And if they are, by the way, you know, I hate to say this, but like that's not the kind of person we want because that's not the kind of like self motivated driven person that we want in the government. So my pitch to people is look, come here, do something, you know, not just as good for your country, that's fine, but like do something that's actually good for yourself, which is come spend two or three years to work on like some of the most complex hardest problems there are out there, right? If you're interested in space, like go work at NASA, what like Jared Isaacman at NASA is doing is fucking awesome, and like you should be part of that. Or if you want energy stuff, go to Department of Energy, there's all kinds of cool like super computer stuff and all kinds of things, work on these hard problems. And then after that, quite frankly, if you wanna go to private sector, that's amazing. Like let's help you go to the private sector. So this tech force program I mentioned, in addition to these two year stints, we've partners with 40 private companies, right? So all the names you would know, right? You know, Alphabet and Meta and Databricks and all these guys. And what they're doing during the two years is they're gonna do training and career development for these folks in this program. And at the end of the two years, we're gonna do like a massive job fair. And if we've done our job right in the government, we have trained these folks so well that I want, you know, every private company to be fawning over these people. It's a little bit like, you know, you and I were mentioning, right, in Israel and the IDF, right, they have this cyber core where it's the best, the brightest kids coming out of high school and go to the cyber core. And when they come out, every like venture capital firm is falling all over themselves to fund these guys. Every like cyber company wants to hire them. Like that's the kind of thing like we want for the federal government.
00:42:16 · Scott Kupor, David Senra
And if people love being government, great, God bless them, they can stay in government. But like we don't need to ask people to make like thirty, forty year commitments. [00:42:23] S0: I think you're appealing to interest is way smarter than saying, Hey, here's the government, you're a citizen, come try to do something good for the government. Will get some percentage of people, but it's like, you're gonna get a lot more if it's like, no, this is actually good for you and your country at the same time. That's with incentives. And look what could happen. Like, this is where your starting point is when you come in, this is what we can do. This is what you'll learn during this, and this is what happens after that. [00:42:45] S1: That's exactly right. And then while you're here, which comes to the second point is, look, I have to create a high performance culture for people like that to succeed. Right? So if I can convince young, aggressive, like career minded people to come to government, they can't come to the environment that I walked into, which is you have to sit in a job for a year before I consider you promotion, or I can't hire you at a GS 14 level because you have an experience. I'll tell you the story, which is somebody was reminding me of today. So if you follow the Doge stuff, right? There's a guy named Big Balls. Have you ever heard of Big Balls? [00:43:16] S0: I've heard of
00:43:17 · Scott Kupor
[00:43:17] S1: Big I hate peanut butter. I don't know anything else, but his name. It's very hard to say it on air, but anyways, his... He had... As I mentioned to somebody I talked this morning, he actually has a name. His name is Ed. So apologies to his mom that basically Big Balls has become his name. He joined the government. He joined Doge. He joined Elon's team. I think he was 19 years old. He went to Northwestern. I think he dropped out as a sophomore. Okay? And he's one of like the most brilliant software developers around basically. And he's like, look, I got motivated by Elon and I want to do this stuff. And he's still there by the way, he works for Gebbia now as part of this national design studio, which is like redesigning all of the like web sites for the government. Anyway, when I saw this article come out a few months after he joined, this was in the height of the dough stuff when of course everyone was, you know, thinking the world had come to an end. And there was a quote from a government employee that said, we would never hire, he didn't say big balls, he said Ed. He said, we would never hire Ed in government because he didn't have a college degree and he didn't have five years of work experience. And when I saw that, like literally, like I wanted to pull my fucking hair out because I was like, this is exactly the problem, right? This guy's awesome, we should hire him because he actually has the skills to help us and literally every job description in government, almost all of them have like a college degree requirement. Well, in my mind, that is a proxy for skill that may be indicative of something, but may not, right? Like the fact that Ed didn't have a college degree had no bearing on his software engineering skillset, but it would have been used to basically kept him out of a job because he would not have qualified, or we would have hired him at like this low level where we would have paid him like $40,000 a year, which he never would do. Of course, he would go to Silicon Valley and get paid like 10 times that, right? So part of this is like, if we're going to get great people, we have to be able to actually have them walk into a culture that actually believes in performance, that believes in accountability, that allows them to progress the organization, that pays them at the level that's appropriate for them.
00:45:01 · Scott Kupor, David Senra
Look, we're never going to like pay what Silicon Valley does, and that's fine and that's okay. But we ought to at least level people appropriately so that Ed should not come in at this GS five, which is like the most entry level for government. He should come in at a GS 14 or 15, which is the highest levels because his merit shows that he's capable of performing at that level. But the system as it existed would not have allowed that to happen. So this is what we've been doing from a policy perspective is to fix all that stuff and say like merit matters, take a test, take an assessment and everything else quite frankly, you know, like we shouldn't worry about. [00:45:31] S0: So big balls kind of gives you the blueprint where he says, I'm super talented. Yes. Dropout, maybe never wouldn't qualify for the set of requirements in federal government, but I heard this person I admire tell a compelling story. [00:45:45] S1: Exactly. Right. [00:45:46] S0: You came in before, during, after Doge, like what was?
00:45:46 · David Senra, Scott Kupor
[00:45:46] S0: You came in before, during, after Doge, like what was? [00:45:49] S1: Yeah. So I came in with... Basically, I got interviewed and I came in with the Doge guy. So it was obviously Elon, but of course, were guys like Steve Davis was kind of the day to day person running it. And I had the opportunity to spend a bunch of time with them pre inauguration, so kind of, you know, end of... I got nominated, like, first week of December or something. And so kind of December and first part of January lead to inauguration. Then what happens is they tell you, okay. Like, until you get through your nomination process, you basically have to be persona non grata and, like, stop communicating with folks because otherwise, it can, like, fail your nomination process. So we had developed a bunch of plans and ideas for what we would do once, like, the administration turned over. But I wasn't there day one to be able to actually execute those things. [00:46:30] S0: But you're observing a lot of what was going on. [00:46:31] S1: That's exactly right. And they were executing it literally out of my office. So it turns out like my office was like the like ground central for ground zero for like everything was happening. [00:46:39] S0: So regardless of controversy over anything that happened there, I'm not even interested in that. I'm interested if there any ideas that you saw coming out of that that you thought were good and valuable and should be spread further?
00:46:52 · Scott Kupor
[00:46:52] S1: Yeah, here's my view overall on it, is part of the issue is, okay, just to give you a sense of the numbers, right? So there were roughly 2,300,000 federal civilian employees on day one when President Trump took office. Today, we're just about 2,000,000. So we've reduced by close to 300,000 people, the size of the federal government, which puts the federal government at the lowest level it's been as a percentage of the workforce since like 1960. And you literally have to go back to like Clinton Gore before you have anywhere even close to that. The numbers that president has is is much higher, but still, like, that's the last time he had any serious effort. So part of it is, look, the entire apparatus of government is... Travels in one direction only, which is budgets just get bigger every year, every time an agency wants to do something new, go back to Congress and they say, you want us do that thing? Give us more headcount to do it. So like that's been the path of like travel basically for the last, I don't know, fifty years probably or something like that. So the way I think about what Elon did was like Elon had to come in and to change... To like change the direction of a 2,300,000 person like oil tanker, you can't do gradual incremental stuff, like you have to have a big bang approach, right? Now people can argue and debate about his tactics and it's it's fair. I think there's, you know, there's fair arguments to have on to have on both sides, but like the idea that you had to have someone come in with a mission and actually try to like do some serious change, like I don't think there's any argument that you could ever make the change that we did without effectively like a big bank strategy. Look, he got a lot of shit for it, lots of people got a lot of shit for it. And you know, look, history will will write the story about that one. What we're trying to do now, like when I came in was, I was like, great. All the... They did all this work. Now we have to institutionalize this. That's kind of how I think about my role, which is okay, like Elon, Steve Davis, all these guys did amazing job of like breaking glass basically and saying like, this is how things are gonna be. Now we have to like do the long term institutionalization of it, which means we have to now go through and say, great, what are you actually working on?